


History Lessons

by Margo_Kim



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: BAMF Melinda May, Backstory, Canon Character of Color, Friendship, Gen, Guns, Non-Graphic Violence, Old Friends, Post-Season/Series 01, Pre-Canon, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-31
Updated: 2014-07-31
Packaged: 2018-02-11 05:39:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2055801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Melinda’s face hit the concrete floor, at the exact moment that her nose shattered, she thought to herself, <em>And this is why we don’t let old friends into our secret base. </em>These days, old friends were a SHIELD agent’s worst enemy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	History Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vacillating](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vacillating/gifts).



As Melinda’s face hit the concrete floor, at the exact moment that her nose shattered, she thought to herself, _And this is why we don’t let old friends into our secret base._ These days, old friends were a SHIELD agent’s worst enemy.

The steel toe of a boot pressed against her cheek. “Get up.” He had a knife strapped around his ankle, hidden under his jeans. It would be child’s play to rip up the hem, grab the blade, and drive it into the back of his knee. To start. Melinda was sure that she’d find a few more suitable places to stab along the way.

Instead, she laid her hands flat on the hanger floor and slowly pushed herself to her knees. She slid her eyes up the gun leveled at her forehead and met the face of her attacker. Her smirking attacker, with flop sweat and darting eyes. Really. He could have at least done her the courtesy of pretending to be professional.

“If I didn't know you, I'd have thought that I'd found the wrong bunker. This is just sad.” Jack Cassidy. SHIELD agent. Level seven, back when that had meant something. They’d served on eight separate missions together. He was one of the handful of friends who had actually met her ex-wife. And he was a traitor. Melinda had suspected that when he came knocking on the secret door to the Playground, but even after every betrayal they'd suffered, Phil still wanted to give Cassidy a chance. That was just who Phil was.

Melinda had thought Jack an above average agent when they'd been on the same side of the gun. The longer they talked, the lower her estimation of him dropped. He should have shot her by now. He didn’t even have the excuse of a stranger’s ignorance. “Put your hands on your head, Melinda. Don’t get sneaky on me.”

Cassidy had stepped back as she rose, moving just outside grabbing distance. If she lunged for him now, the bullet would hit her before she hit him. Melinda raised her hands and put them on the top of her head. He chuckled, a fake little power play of a laugh. She thought again about stabbing him. “Melinda May. The Cavalry.” His eyes darted nervously over her. “When they told us to stop using the nickname, I didn’t know it was because you didn’t deserve it.” He laughed again, a tense braying. “With a fight like that, I can’t believe you ever saved anyone.”

When Miranda wouldn’t speak, he laughed once more. Chattering men never knew how to handle silence. It frightened them more than gunshots.

“You’re getting old, Melinda. Ten years ago, you’d have known enough to shoot me before I got close to your door.”

Her first week as an agent (was it really three decades ago?) had ended similarly to this. An empty room, a cut lip, her hands behind her head, and a tough guy who likely did the _Taxi_ speech every morning in the mirror before he holstered his gun. _Plus ça change._ There were always cruel men for hire. The only difference was Melinda. She’d cried that day and meant it. She was nineteen years old. It didn’t matter what she told her handler—she wasn't ready to die, no matter what cause it was for. The man had laughed at her tears. He'd wiped them away with the muzzle of his pistol. All these years later, she still remembered in perfect detail the hot steel dragged across her cheek. He'd fired a warning shot by her left ear when she'd lunged at him. If it wasn't for SHIELD, she'd have gone deaf in that ear. If it wasn't for SHIELD, she never would have been there at all. The organization had happily taken from her everything that she had willingly given.

“No one’s coming to save you,” Cassidy said quietly. “I made sure of that. Even if they wake up before I can come question them, every door between here and there is locked. Everyone’s accounted for. Everyone except one.”

They’d studied together at the Academy—Melinda and Jack. They were two of the stronger Operations candidate. Unlike her, Jack was getting groomed for the higher levels. According to his progress reports, he had the natural, unexplainable charisma of leaders. Which meant that he was white, good-looking, male, and at least halfway articulate, but Melinda hadn't begrudged him his success. He’d had Ambitions, everyone knew it. Only eighteen and an eye on the director's chair. Melinda had never wanted the throne. Back then, she couldn’t imagine ever wanting to be promoted out of the field.

Cassidy tapped his gun against her broken nose.  “You want to save your life? Tell me where the dead man walking is. I want to meet the new director. Say hello, start winning him over. You know you can’t get anywhere if the boss doesn’t like you.”

It was a setup and Melinda couldn’t resist. “You always were a brownnoser.”

Cassidy smiled humorlessly down at her. “So you do still speak.”

If you’d stood Phil and Cassidy side by side when she’d first met them, Melinda couldn’t have guessed which one would end up director. Phil she met three years after she graduated, when she came back to her alma mater to assist the field assessments. An old hard-ass of a drillmaster, Dr.  Orozco, had been on hand to patch up the students after Melinda was done with them. Watch out for this next one, she’d told Melinda near the end of day three. The next recruit was supposed to have _potential_.

Melinda broke Phil’s jaw that day, his jaw, two ribs, and his right pointer finger. Phil had clipped her on the ear with a rubber bullet. It was the first blood she’d shed that entire exam period. “Your form is sloppy,” she’d told him as Dr. Orozco medicated him. “But your tactics are good.”

Phil had looked up at her, twenty-two years old and already beginning to bald, already with that guileless look that had no place in the eyes of a spy, and he said, through the mass of bandaging covering his lower face, “Thanks, Agent May.”

This time Cassidy smacked the gun against bloody smear of her nose. Melinda let the yelp of pain tear out of her. It echoed through the empty hanger as the blood rushed out anew. “I’m running out of patience, Mel.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He had a twitch in his left eye that matched the one in his trigger finger. “So you prefer ‘the Cavalry’?”

In answer, Melinda spat a pink froth of blood and saliva onto his nice, shiny boots. They looked down at the mess together. Then his leg twitched, and in the second before impact, Melinda weighed her options. With a little internal sigh, she twisted and let his foot slam into her tensed stomach. She grunted and fell to the fetal position, feigning the gasps of a person with the wind knocked out of them. While she was down there on the floor with her head between her knees, she risked one little sentence. “How’re we doing?” It was a breath quieter than a whisper, but Fitz’s microphone, a clear, almost invisible membrane the size of a Band-Aid stretched over her throat, picked up everything pure and clear.

“We’re nearly there,” Skye said, her voice low in Melinda’s ear. “His computer was _way_ harder to crack than I thought, but I’m through his security and into Hydra’s database. You should read his emails—his bosses are so majorly pissed that he hasn’t grabbed Coulson yet.”

Cassidy grabbed Melinda by the lapel and yanked her up. Melinda jerked to her feet, clinging to his arms. She kept her legs limp, and Cassidy staggered for a moment under her dead weight. “Tell me where Coulson’s hiding. Hydra just wants him. The rest of your little team can disappear wherever they want.”

“This is crazy, May.” Even over the comm, Melinda could hear Skye typing. “He’s not a high level Hydra agent so there’s only so much I can get, but we’re downloading straight from Hydra’s mainframe.”

“Open your mouth and _talk_ ,” Cassidy said. “Don’t you think the silent badass routine is a little old?”

Melinda heard Skye snort.

“I know how Hydra works,” Melinda said to Cassidy. “You’ll kill us all.”

“Scout’s honor, May,” Cassidy said. For a second, he sounded like the man she’d known when they both were twenty. Children running around with guns and big dreams. “This isn’t about killing SHIELD agents. That’s over. We won. We don’t care about the ragtag group of former somebodies hiding out in an old base. I’m not here to off the new director of SHIELD. I’m just here for a little bit of his blood.”

Melinda’s hands tightened around Cassidy’s wrists. “His blood?”

“That’s it. I swear.”

The night that Phil became Director Coulson, all of three weeks ago, he and Melinda had stayed up until five in the morning talking. Not about SHIELD. Not about Hydra. Not about the traitors. Not about the dead. Not about spying. Not about accusations. They talked about baseball, and that game they’d seen together in ’94 that still had the best triple play either of them had ever seen. And how Melinda’d had to call her mother for a ride. And whether or not they should fly this plane straight down to the real Tahiti right now.

“Come on, Melinda. You and me getting massages and tans down on the beach,” Phil’d said. “After all this, tell me it doesn’t sound nice.”

“Just you and me?” she’d teased.

Phil had jerked his head in the direction of his poor, battered, recuperating team. “We can drop the kids off with your mom.” 

Melinda smiled.

“There something funny?” Cassidy asked.

She smashed her forehead into his nose. He let her go and staggered away, the bottom half of his face now covered in a rush of blood. Now she and he matched. Before Cassidy could recover, Melinda ran her knee into his groin. When he bent double, she clapped his head hard enough to his eardrums burst, then grabbed him by hair and kneed him in the face. Something cracked. His nose breaking again, she thought, but when he fell to the floor, Melinda realized from the look of him that it must have been his left cheekbone. Cassidy didn’t get up, but he wasn’t unconscious either. He stared up at her with bright, wondering eyes. He looked betrayed. One more kick and he was out.

“Was that the sound of you kicking his ass?” Skye asked.

Melinda touched her fingertips to her nose and grimaced. “His face.” But she didn’t hurt too badly. Cassidy never landed a hit she wasn’t ready for. He should have realized that too. But Cassidy had never forgotten the Melinda he met thirty years ago. It was the rare person who could change their opinion of someone over time. To him, Melinda was always the girl he had rescued on her first assignment from getting shot square in the face.

“It’s so cool you’re my SO now,” Skye said. “Did you know that? It’s really cool.”

Melinda knelt down and checked Cassidy’s pulse. Alive. If they wanted to keep him that way, he’d need medical attention soon. If they didn’t need him, it’d be a simple thing to strangle him in his sleep. She could give him the traitor’s reward.

But Cassidy had saved her. Once upon a time.

“So we were right. Hydra is after Coulson’s magic alien blood,” Skye was saying as Melinda looked down at Cassidy’s slack face. “And mine too, I guess. Looks like everyone’s getting into the super soldier business.”

“Is there anything about Project Tahiti in the files you downloaded?”

Skye hummed as she looked. “Nothing the automatic search is pulling up. We might need to go through by hand. Or it might be above this jackass’s pay grade. And you were right again, dude was totally bugged. The second you knocked him out, someone remotely crashed his computer. We just barely downloaded everything. Good stalling.”

Melinda stood up and stretched. “Get Coulson on the comm.”

“I’m here,” Phil said, more grainy sounding than Skye. Different mike. “The rest of us are still locked in our bunks, by the way. If anyone wanted to come let us out.”

“Skye—” Melinda started.

“I’m going, I’m going,” Skye said. “Send the level one agent to do the grunt work, I see how it is.”

Phil laughed. “Trust me, Skye, you’re getting off easy. Do you know what Melinda did to me when I was a level one agent?”

“Something horribly violent and painful because SHIELD was ridiculous?”

 _SHIELD_ is _ridiculous. As long as we’re stubborn bastards, it’s present tense,_ Melinda thought. “Go let your team out.” When Skye clicked off the line, there was silence. Melinda lowered herself to sit against the cold hanger wall. Phil liked talking, but he liked quiet too. That was one of the reasons Melinda had first agreed to work with him all those years ago.

“Jack Cassidy,” she said. “God damn it.”

Phil sighed. “I know.”

Melinda leaned her head back against the wall and watched the still body of her prisoner through slits for eyes.

The night they’d talked, neither Melinda nor Phil wanted to apologize to each other. She said nothing about spying on him He said nothing about his suspicions. You could regret the outcome of your choices without regretting your choices themselves. Everything Melinda and Phil had done had been based on all the information they had. You didn’t last long in this line of work taking the job personally. But at the same time, you spend enough years not apologizing for the things you’ve done, you start thinking you don’t have to. It wasn’t until they were finally going to bed that Phil clasped her hand. “Do you remember the first time we met?” Phil had said. “You told me I had potential. It meant a lot.”

“I meant it,” Melinda had replied. “I still think it.”     

He had the same light in his eye he’d had twenty-eight years ago, but the smile—that was more crooked than the one he’d had before he’d met her. She’d returned his smile, and that was how they said they were sorry.

“Tell Hill we’ve got a prisoner for her,” Melinda said to Phil. “Tell her she knows him.”  

Old friends were a dangerous commodity these days. Too much history. Too little learning.

The hanger door clicked as the lock released, and Skye heaved it open. “Hello, hi, I am rescuing you.” Skye rotated her arm, grimacing. “Rescuing you from opening that super heavy door. Tripp’s letting FitzSimmons out. Wouldn’t it be super funny if we just, like, left Coulson in his bunk?”

“Tell her no,” Phil said.

“You totally just smiled,” Skye said, “so I’m taking that as you agreeing with me one hundred percent. Also we should definitely put ice on your face or something.”

Half of Melinda’s graduating class had been traitors. The other half were dead. Friends were dangerous, and friends were rare. _Fine,_ Melinda thought as Skye helped pull her to her feet. She’d only keep the ones who proved themselves worth the risk.


End file.
